>Do I, as a human, have any interest in constantly helping squirrels with whatever idiotic problem they think they face?
Were you, as a human, purpose-built expressly to constantly help squirrels with their problems?
Were you, as a human, purpose-built expressly to constantly help squirrels with their problems?
"Purpose" is something we project onto the world, not something that nature possesses.
(Maybe it is? A human engineer trying to design something that maximizes its inclusive genetic fitness might make it do so more explicitly. Maybe that would produce things that are better about doing it in practice than we are. But "evolution is smarter than you are" and I think we would have trouble actually doing better than evolution by designing deliberate fitness-maximizers. After all, our present best attempts in the direction of making machines smart enough to survive in the world have largely given up on trying to program particular goals and purposes into them directly!)